Not far from where Trinity Place meets Ponce De Leon Avenue in Decatur is a small white house. And if you take a chance to read the historical marker in its yard, you’ll quickly learn that it isn’t your ordinary home.
It was from inside that house that a woman named Mary Gay witnessed the civil war and its effects on civilian life in the South–experiences which she would one day document in an 1897 book titled, “Life in Dixie during the War.”
Rather than chronicling stories from the battlefields, as many union and confederate veterans did in memoires published after the war, Gay sought to capture daily life during the period, which for her family meant enduring an occupation by union forces of her town and her very home. Her account is one of only a few books about life on the home front during the conflict (and also one of the few written by a woman).
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